89 comments:

Geert Wilders posted his 15-minute film on a Web site. Shortly afterward, Dutch television channels showed segments of the film and broadcast discussions by analysts on the possible impact of its release..

The Dutch government had warned Wilders that a film offensive to Muslims could spark violent protests in Islamic countries, like those two years ago after European newspapers published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

"The film equates Islam with violence. We reject this," Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said in a televised reaction.

You're wasting your breath, Bob. None of this is unknown. There's really nothing to do with people like Ash but throw them in with the Islamers to the deep black pit they came from and bulldozer them over.

Wretchard said... Al-Qaeda is almost certain to respond. They have to. Wilders, to use the Continental expression, has crapped in their face. When al-Qaeda's revenge takes place then "Europe" and "America" -- that is to say the governments -- must choose between cracking down on any speech that criticizes Islam or allowing more criticism to take place.

Neither path is safe. The Wilders challenge is powerful because it demonstrates how ordinary Western life has become incompatible with the existence of radical Islam. While radical Islam was something that went on only in the distant hills of Afghanistan it was safe to ignore. But now that Islam is claiming veto power over Western political and intellectual life the struggle has moved to where it cannot be put aside.

Now will governments risk an almost revolutionary change in the constitutional basis of Western government by appeasing Islam or will they risk confronting Islam? There is no safe course.

And had governments been wiser they would have taken the lead in fighting extremism instead of falling behind their populations. That way they could have controlled the pace. If were the Dutch Government I would have offered Wilders the expulsion of every suspected Islamic terrorist from the Netherlands in exchange for not releasing Fitna. "Let us do it" should have been their policy.

But no. That would have caused them pain from the Left. But as Churchill pointed out, they will have their pain anyway -- and from the Left too.

Bobal, there certainly is a lot of nastiness associated with radical Islam and I have little tolerance for religious folk of all stripes who get their knickers in a knot when their religion is criticized. The key is what are we going to do about it? I have great respect for the US committment to freedom of speech and the separation of religion from the state. More governments should do the same. Does that mean we should invade and occupy those who don't choose that path? No.

Finally, we have the story of Hillary Clinton and her bullet-dodging landing in Bosnia in 1996, which turns out to have been, in fact, a perilous descent into untruth. Mrs. Clinton has used the words “strength” and “experience” so often during the course of her campaign that they might as well be tattooed onto her knuckles.

Her essential argument is that, unlike Mr. Obama, she has the foreign policy credentials to go up against Mr. McCain and win — a claim that has been dismissed by critics who assert that being first lady isn’t remotely like being secretary of defense. Fair or not, those critics got a real boost when it was revealed that at least one of her claims from that period was, at best, misremembered.

The Bosnia flap undermined Mrs. Clinton’s case for experience at a moment when she is desperately trying to convince her party’s superdelegates that she is the only Democrat who can win. Perhaps worse, though, the controversy played perfectly into an anti-Clinton narrative that Mr. Obama has peddled — namely, that Clintons, both of them, will say or do anything to win. (Exit polls from the Mississippi primary showed that half the voters questioned Mrs. Clinton’s integrity.)

The film was not available for long because of what the website cited as technical difficulties. But it had provoked protest even before it was shown.

Mr Wilders, who has been under heavy guard because of death threats, said he made the film because "Islam and the Koran are dangers to the preservation of freedom in the Netherlands in the long term and I have to warn people of that".

He added: "It's not a provocation but. . . it's five minutes before midnight and this is the last warning as far as I'm concerned."

What to do about it, Ash. That's the question, and I admit--please don't take offense--I get my knickers in a twist sometimes, out of frustration, cause I really don't know what to do about it. Not let any more of them into north America, we could at least start with that.I'm surprosed we haven't been hit again. They'd like to, I think we can all agree.

To answer the question of what we have to fear today, perhaps Team Obama could talk to Theo van Gogh. Oh never mind--he's dead.

Maybe they could ask Hirsan Ali, who has millions of people who would like to make her dead, too. If they're of a mind to, they could begin a dialogue with the gay community in the Netherlands or the rocket-dodging population in Israel.

By the way, Idaho was one of the first to extend rights to the ladies, I'll have you know! And the heroine of the book, Miss Walden, was a free thinker, too. Nobody was going to tell her what she must do!

More serious than a normal knifing, because hate, not greed was the cause. It was not jealousy or frustration, but Religion that was the cause of the hate.

Religion must be outlawed, banned.No more Catholics preaching Liberation.No more Protestants preaching liberationNo more Jews promoting LiberationNo more Islamists preaching, at all.Ban one, ban them all.All are a poison, to a civil society.From El Salvador to Islamabad.

We must become secular to save the world from the historic consequences of Religious Wars.

Kill all those that disagree, or at least ban them from eating & drinking, in public.

The "veto power" to which Wretchard refers belongs to governments - specifically those that have taken upon themselves the privilege of regulating speech, and more specifically so-called "hate speech." Because such laws cannot be objectively, but only arbitrarily, subjectively, enforced, they naturally become vehicles for any pressure groups within and without those governments. To the extent that there is "veto power" over political and intellectual life, it is the extent of the power of the one institution that has the legal means of enforcing it.

Blowback's a bitch.

But I don't think this is the dishonest part. Wretchard's no conservative, after all.

The dishonesty is in the sweeping claim to actual power on the part of Islam in the West that bears no relation to everyday reality. The Wu Wei phenomenon (we are literally on the verge of being overrun by a Muslim horde) I can understand. He wasn't that bright. Wretchard may be no genius, but he's not that dumb.

I agree with that, pretty much. And our constitution does so. Yet, the Bible, for instance, is a wonderful book. One walks a knife's edge, reading it. There's an old saying, if a fool looks in, you can't expect a genius to look back out. It takes work reading the Bible. In my life I've gotten quite a bit of pleasure out of it, but with a lot of help from those that know more than I.

Rat, I have, yes. A preventative measure. They are anti-thetical to the Constitution. You're the guy that talks up the Constitution:) And I agree with you. Why then, let in folk that want to tear down the very thing you raised your right hand to uphold?

Of course, the US can claim that Iran could proliferate nuclear devices. When in fact, the US has, in direct violation of the Non Proliferation Treaty. Both the letter and the spirit of that Treaty.

We claim, now, it was an "error".Just a slight "mistake". A clerical error, no doubt.

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered a full inventory of all nuclear weapons and related materials after the mistaken delivery of ballistic missile fuses to Taiwan, the Pentagon said Thursday.

Gates told officials with the Air Force, Navy and Defense Logistics Agency to assess inventory control procedures for the materials and to submit a report within 60 days.

Earlier this week, Gates directed Navy Adm. Kirkland H. Donald to take charge of a full investigation of the delivery mistake in which four cone-shaped electrical fuses used in intercontinental ballistic missile warheads were shipped to the Taiwanese instead of the helicopter batteries they had ordered.

It was the second nuclear-related mistake involving the military that has been revealed in recent months. In August an Air Force B-52 bomber was mistakenly armed with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and flown from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La. At the time, the pilot and crew were unaware they had nuclear arms aboard.

The electrical fuses were delivered in fall 2006, but the military did not fully realize the gravity of the blunder until last week.

Now, Taiwan is nuclear capable, too. Betcha they reversed engineered them fuses, knowing, right away, that they were not helicopter batteries.

The Hebrew Bible should be studied as a poetic historic saga, not as a religious text. I'd also like to see all persons and things associated with religion to be heavily taxed, much like cigarettes and alcohol but more so.

Dymphna of Gates of Vienna recommended to me a book called “Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization,” by Rémi Brague. The Romans admired the earlier culture of the Greeks.

Christians had a love/hate relationship with Judaism, but they did recognize that the Jews had an older religious tradition than they did themselves, and that they were greatly indebted to it. Christian Europeans thus inherited a twin “cultural secondarity” in relations to their Greek and Hebrew parent cultures.

Brague sees this phenomenon of secondarity as the very essence of the Latin West, and dubs it “Romanity.”

Mat, have you noticed, in the Bible, the young person in the family comes out on top, in the end?

I think it really is a wonderful book of liberation, and even in the shadows, is saying, it doesn't have to be like this.

Freud, don't you know, and them psychologists, noticed that the young person in the family often gets beat on by the older sibs. It is true, too, in many cases. Little bouncing baby comes along and ruins the relationship of the older with ma, pa.

But the Bible puts the young one on top, as if to even things out, saying it doesn't have to be like this.

We must tell the truth, recalling that when the Pope, John Paul the Second, spoke out, himself, against Liberation Theology, the war of liberation, in El Salvador, ended.

That's really interesting. We had a guy in my church, young whathisname, a student pastor, that was all fired up with liberation theology. He insisted on going down to El Salvador, and most of us tried to talk him out of it. He went, came back alive, and got on with a church in Boise. Nice fella, full of fire, but a guy that gives meaning to the idea of wise old whiskers being a good thing in life. If he were running our economy, we'd all be broke.

Peter Berger, one of the world’s leading authorities on sociology of religion, put in a nutshell what all secularists, and especially Turkey’s fuming ones, should get. “Modernization does not necessarily secularize societies,” the Boston University professor noted, “it rather pluralizes them.”

...

Religion’s significance might be turning into common wisdom today, but it was not so a century ago. Most intellectuals of the early 20th century actually believed that religion was a pre-modern myth which would soon expire thanks to modernization.

...

One might wonder whether what worked with Protestantism, and which soon incorporated Catholicism as well, could work with Islam, too. Can Islam be compatible with, and contributory to, the open society?

Ha, ha, ha! With me, it's just the opposite. My bro is a doctor, a great skier, a scubaman, a pilot, the goddamned prick beats me in everything,but Mat, and I'm not making this up, me and my Jewish lawyer, we slew all the philistines, when the going got tough. They tried to put ol' bob outta bidness, but me n my lawyer, we got em.

Why, I have philistine foreskins right here in my drawer!

26% of the stock, ended up with over 60% of the value of our little corporation. And, we did it legal. And, I have loved Jewish lawyers ever since.

Reached by telephone, Ian Morrison with the CBC watchdog group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting said he believes the decision to dismantle the orchestra resulted partially from the integration of the radio and television services, and the eradication of the position of Vice President, Radio following the retirement last year of Jane Chalmers.

"Until now, somebody — I would assume Jane Chalmers and her predecessors have somehow protected this special jewel in Vancouver … and now it too has been zapped."

Morrison warns there will likely be more cuts at the CBC ahead, especially if the Stephen Harper Conservatives win a majority in the next election.

What I think is my Jewish lawyer had absorbed the narrative, but didn't really know it that way, like an outsider like myself might. He saw, very clearly, bob they're hittin' on you. And he went to work. He's a secular like you Mat, but it goes deep, those stories. That's what I think. And like.

Later this spring, Westview students will be taking a similar message of respect for different cultures to students at nearby Mesa Verde Middle School.

"I think that's the silver lining that came out of all of that," said Darlene Willis, the cofounder of the Concerned Parents Alliance, a nonprofit community group that decried the racial incidents and successfully led the district to adopt a stricter policy for hate crimes. "Yes we are different, but we can learn from this."

But Willis, who has a son who is a senior at Westview, said she was hesitant to say that racism is no longer an issue on the campus. The recent incidents and the conversations that have grown out of them have created an opportunity for continued dialogue on the topic, she said.

Kuwaiti police used tear gas on Wednesday to disperse hundreds of tribesmen protesting at the arrest of eight men for organising an illegal form of primary elections.The eight men from Kuwait’s major tribes were remanded in police custody after they were interrogated over their role in organising tribal elections which are banned by law.

Police resorted to tear gas after the crowds tried to force open the gate of the Criminal Investigation Department in Salmiya where the men were being held, witnesses said.Demonstrators rallied outside the building east of Kuwait City for five hours, demanding the immediate release of the men.

Earlier, about 300 members of Al-Awazem, Al-Ajman and Al-Hawajer tribes, led by a number of former MPs — including Khaled Al-Adwah, Saad Al-Shurai, Ali Al-Hajeri, Jaber Al-Muhailbi, Ghanim Al-Mae and Abdullah Al-Ajmi — gathered Wednesday in front of the General Criminal Investigations Department (GCID) in Salmiya to demand the release of five out of eight members of the tribes, who were arrested Tuesday, for allegedly holding tribal primaries for the Fifth Constituency.The protesters said they would not leave the building unless HH Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser Mohammad Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah or Interior Minister Jaber Al-Khaled Al-Sabah arrived on the scene to hear their demands.

Very compassionate of the elite and all the submissive dhimmis that would rather maintain their warm fuzzy pc feelings about illegals than protect fellow citizens our jobs, infrastructure, and institutions, and preserve the country.

If Congress and the administration do broaden the formal powers of the Fed, it would be the latest in a long history of financial policy made out of a crisis. The Great Depression fueled an array of stock exchange regulation.

The 1987 stock market crash led to curbs on stock trades. The 2002 corporate scandals led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

And after the panic of 1907, a National Monetary Commission was formed to figure out how to prevent such things from happening again. Its crowning achievement: The creation of the Federal Reserve.

"There are many such orders in the Jordan Valley, mostly against the Palestinians. The civil administration is quick to issue them but slow to execute them," he said.

From his perspective, Tal said, the placement of the modular homes was legal because after the 2005 disengagement the project had been initially approved by both then-prime minister Ariel Sharon and then-defense minister (and current Transportation Minister) Shaul Mofaz.

Gets back to Bacevich's idea that ending "combat" involvement in Iraq will usher in the possibility of a conservative revival.

But that's only true if there's general agreement as to the nature and purpose of conservatism.

There isn't.

Under the circumstances, you have an equal chance of occasioning such a revival by simply keeping 140K troops there indefinitely. And that's if we're not already experiencing "conservatism," philosophically disarrayed as it is, at its apogee.

Someone like Condi Rice doesn't go to Grover Norquist's den to talk about the Annapolis Middle East peace process. She's going to secure her future in Republican politics and to position herself as a 'potential' VP candidate on the McCain ticket.

Grover Norquist is author of the new book, Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government's Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives. It would be interesting to know which pages of the book Condi has dog-eared.

"McCain's lifetime rating from the ACU, considered the authority on conservative rankings, is 82.3, though it dropped in recent years and was 65 in 2006, when five senators had a perfect score.

His record is hard to assess. National Journal, which ranks members according to the political tilt of their votes, found that since Republicans took control of the Senate in 1995, "McCain has moved steadily to the middle" and by 2006 was the 46th most conservative senator."

Bill Clinton made a significant admission in Corpus Christi, Texas this month - saying he had decided to pardon Puerto Rican terrorists back in 1999 "based on the stuff I was given by the staff."

But Ron Kolb, the citizen whose questioning prompted the ex-president's comment, rightly pointed out that the FBI and Justice Department had opposed the pardons. The clear conclusion is that it was Clinton's political staff who pushed for clemency - with the obvious goal of helping Hillary Clinton's bid to become a New York senator.

Bill still denies that was his motive, of course - but no one believes it. The lobbying by Hispanic politicians from New York on the issue had been years-long; the culmination was noted by the New Republic noted back in '99: "Two days before the president announced the clemency deal, New York City Councilman Jose Rivera personally presented Hillary with a packet on clemency, including a letter asking her to 'speak to the president and ask him to consider granting executive clemency' to the prisoners."

The FALN, a terrorist group devoted to independence for Puerto Rico, bombed the Fraunces Tavern here in New York City in 1975, killing four and injuring 54 others.

It also:

* Bombed five other downtown New York buildings in 1974.

* Booby trapped a building in Manhattan and then called the police, seriously injuring and partially blinding an officer.

* Exploded two bombs in Chicago's Loop in 1975.

* Bombed the Merchandise Mart in Chicago in 1977.

* Bombed a Mobil Oil office in New York, killing one person, in 1977.

* Bombed two Chicago military recruiting offices in 1979.

* Injured three police officers in New York bombings in 1982.

Even in those pre-9/11 days, pardoning terrorists who weren't even remorseful drew public outrage; candidate Hillary soon wound up condemning Bill's decision.

But when it comes to politics, they really are a team - Hillary's administration would be staffed from the same pool that Bill drew upon.

The same team that freed hardened terrorists to win political markers for Hillary - the same team that's now willing to tear the Democratic Party apart in its desperate bid to steal the nomination for Hillary - would once again be empowered to free the guilty and endanger the innocent, whenever it suited their political needs.

Why does Hillary think America will trust her enough to make her president?

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.